T. Boone Pickens was on the show today talking about a plan to use natural gas to decrease our independence on OPEC. Read all about it here. And feel free to discuss it in the comments.

How would America's biggest oil companies react to this cap-and-trade legislation? Most people would say "who cares?" because they are big, bad, evil corporations. But you should care, because they big, bad, evil corporations also provide Americans with jobs and energy.

So how will these companies react? According to Bloomberg News, they will be closing plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. You see, fuel importers will only need to purchase permits for the fuel that is to be burned by cars, trucks, etc. Domestic oil companies, on the other hand, would also have to buy allowances for any CO2 produced by their plants. Clearly that would make domestic companies less competitive and create an imbalance in the market. Yeah .. .haven't thought of that one, have you?

The CEO of ConocoPhillips, Jim Mulva, says, "It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment."

It is estimated that one out of every six US refineries would close by 2020 because the cost of carbon allowances would simply erase profits, according to the American Petroleum Institute. For the consumer, carbon permits would add 77 cents to the price of a gallon of gasoline. Slowly, people have started to realize that Obama has mastered the art of increasing taxes on businesses, which ultimately pass on those increases in the form of price hikes for consumers.

Newt Gingrich was on the show earlier today and urged you all to go sign the petition to stop the energy tax. It might help the cause if we gave you a link to that. Consider it done.

Today the House is going to vote on this Cap and Trade - more accurately called "Cap and Tax" climate change scam. Any idea as to how big this bill is? Try 1,201 pages. [pdf] Any idea how many members of the House have read the darn thing? Try zero. Yeah, we are talking about a bill that is going to cost us $845 billion over the next 10 years ... and not one House member has read the entire thing.

If you had $845 billion of your own money on the line, do you think you would be combing through this thing tooth and nail? You betcha. But it's the taxpayers ... it's your grandchildren that will eventually suffer. So the House is willing to sit back and let it pass, and the government educated voters out there wouldn't know the difference.

What's happening tomorrow in Hollywood? What movies are coming out this weekend or what sports teams are playing? I bet you the average American can give you a 1,201 dissertation on these questions. Ask them what their Representatives in Congress are doing today ... passing a $845 billion Cap and Tax bill ... brook trout. I guarantee it.

Here's where the government schools and our wonder bread and circuses culture really come in handy for the political class. As with most of the other things they do, this is about power. Power over your pocketbook. Power over your life. They're going to take a naturally occurring function of everyday life and tax it. Well, more accurately .. they're going to lay claim to something that is essential to human life, something that is essential to the very operation of our economy, and then they're going to sell it to us. Believe me, if these same power-hungry cretins could lay claim to the very air that we breathe, and then sell it back to us, they would do it.

It takes a profoundly ignorant American to not realize that this bill is going to increase their cost of living by a fairly good clip. If you listen carefully the politicians have been admitting it ... and they feel free to do so because they by-God know that the people are not listening. Americans have been so sucked-in by this phony global warming scam that they will accept almost any solution the politicians throw at them. Now you understand why it was so important that, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, these politicians were able to scare you to death with global warming. Movies like "Day after Tomorrow" and OwlGore's idiotic flick had a purpose. Convince you that the seas are going to rise to cover your house and the sky is going to turn orange if we don't do something fast. Americans bought it, and now for the big government payoff. Billions and billions of new dollars flowing into political slush funds to enhance the power and guarantee the elections of political hacks who don't have the talent to run a freaking hardware store.

Back in February, the White House passed its stimulus plan with the promise of tax breaks for people who purchase electric cars. However, the latest study from the Government Accountability Office says that electric cars will not by itself decrease any greenhouse gas emissions.

The reason is obvious ... it takes power to plug-in and charge an electric vehicle, and where does much of our country get its power? Coal. The study shows that "if plug-in hybrids reached 56 percent of the cars on the road by 2030, they would require an increased electricity production, much of which would likely come from additional coal plants."

Actually ... they have it wrong. Any ObamaBot can tell you that the power to charge up the batteries in electric cars will come from those windmills the government is going to put on the roof of your houses. If you have houses.

As I've already pointed out, the Obama administration knows that it has to act quick on these big agenda items. Healthcare has clearly taken center stage lately. But we can't forget about Obama's energy legislation. The cap-and-trade bill is back in the mix, and guess what? Obama wants the bill to be passed next week! Next week will be dubbed "energy week." Well isn't that special!

Gawd, that was fast. Just in case you don't remember how incredibly painful this bill would be for the American economy, Citizens Against Government Waste has some more details:

In reality, this cap-and-trade plan is nothing more than a hidden tax that The Heritage Foundation has estimated could increase the average American family's energy bill by $1,500 annually!

..... These higher operating costs for utilities, oil companies, and industry will ultimately trickle down to individual Americans, and you will pay an estimated 74 percent more for gasoline, 90 percent more for electricity, and 55 percent more on your natural gas bill. And that's not the end of it. You'll also pay more for every product that requires fossil fuels in its manufacture or transportation!

The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade plan will also grow the size and cost of government by requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a greenhouse gas (GHG) registry, create a GHG emission allowance transfer system, and set emission allowances from 2012-2050. This army of new bureaucrats will eventually control every aspect of industrial, commercial, and individual energy use. You won't be able to tune up your car or install a grill in your back yard without federal interference ... perhaps even a costly environmental impact study. What's more, the cap-and-trade program will necessarily be ripe for political favoritism and corruption, as politicians and bureaucrats manipulate the system for favored industries.

Climatologist Chip Knappenberger has estimated that the 83 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions mandated under Waxman-Markey by 2050 will result in a drop in climate temperature of only nine-hundredths of 1 degree Fahrenheit. That's equivalent to just two years of avoided global warming.

It's a tax, my friends. It's all about the government getting more of your money. The pretense here is the environment. There's a reason why these environmental pushes come from the political left. It's not about the environment. It's about expanding the scope and the size of the Imperial Federal Government. It's about control over your life. Wake up. Global warming is a fraud.

It's only a matter of time before President Barack Obama's vast popularity runs aground on his energy policies. In the name of saving the planet from global warming, he has delayed new oil drilling, an action that will have major political repercussions once the world economy recovers. Instead of using some [of] the stimulus billions to produce more gas and oil, Obama's wild-eyed supporters dream of "renewable" energy derived from corn, wind, sunshine, and even grass.

With the appointment of extremists like climate czar Carol Browner and science adviser John Holdren, Obama has placed his administration's environmental policy in the hands of radicals. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proposes replacing oil and coal with windmills. Yet Barron's recently reported that America would need to build 500,000 giant offshore windmills and transmission lines to produce Salazar's specified 1,900 gigawatts of electricity. In contrast, oil and gas drilling could provide hundreds of thousands of solid, well-paying blue-collar jobs. . . .

All of these things are happening at a time when natural gas is abundant and cheap. The new technology of horizontal fraccing has made it economically feasible to drill into vast shale deposits in many states, even famously difficult ones like Michigan and New York. Many cars could run on natural gas, much like many buses do already. On a recent trip to Peru, I learned that most taxicabs have been converted to natural gas for a cost of about $1,000 each. New technologies continually revive old oil and gas fields and make new ones economically viable. So it's little more than socialist Malthusianism to argue that the world is running out of cheap energy. Science will always find and harness new sources.

Another detail in Obama's budget is that he plans to end tax breaks for those evil, filthy oil and gas companies. In other words, Obama wants to increase taxes on the oil industry. He wants to end $26 billion in tax breaks, which he classifies as "unjustifiable loopholes ... costly to the American taxpayer and do little to incentivize production or reduce energy prices."

Did he say "costly to the American taxpayers?" Well, he can get away with that because he suspects you don't realize - and many Americans don't - that every penny of additional taxes these evil oil companies have to pay to the federal government will be added to the cost of the products they produce. The tax increases will show up at the gas pumps. I know that this is a difficult concept for the government-educated dumb masses to understand, but corporations - and this includes oil companies - don't pay taxes. They collect taxes from their customers, shareholders and employees and pass them on to the government.

Again ... let me point out that the greatest ally the looters in Washington could possibly have is an uneducated population.

Barack Obama's plan to create green jobs in this country is purely in efforts to expand the number of workers on the government dole. This man is in love with government, and the more people who are getting their paychecks from the government, the better off this country will be.

So when it comes to these "green jobs" .. you do realize that this is an industry that is being created by government for government. This isn't about global warming or saving the planet. It is about government control. And Barack Obama has modeled his plan to create green jobs after Spain's recent efforts create green jobs.

But here are the ugly facts ... every "green job" that was funded by the Spanish government caused the loss of 2.2 regular jobs, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created. And - and this is a big one - only one out of the 10 newly created green jobs became a permanent job. In other words, folks. This isn't long term stimulus. This is a government-created industry that will create a temporary surge in jobs that aren't permanent and will squeeze out private sector growth.

Oh and there is more. Now Spain has been at it for about eight to ten years. And when this economic crisis hit, the study shows that Spain's "green jobs" policy hindered its ability to cope with the crisis. Which is ironic, considering that Barack Obama feels that created "green jobs" will be America's way of getting out of this crisis.

Speaking of green jobs, I've been reading reports recently of community colleges that are seeing a surge in unemployed workers enrolling in courses that offer training in "green-collar" jobs. These are the people that will be installing solar panels and repairing wind turbines and producing biofuels.

But guess what ... all of these people are getting trained, but where are the jobs? The current financial crisis has caused the green industry to take a major hit. Businesses are drying up. So what we will have are a lot of trained workers and too few jobs.

Barack Obama's cap-and-trade plan has been floating around out there for a while. And I have told you several times how this scheme is nothing more than a tax increase, plain and simple. It increases taxes by creating a market for carbon emitted by companies, and these companies somehow have to recoup the costs to pay for these credits. How are they going to do this? Any logical business would increase prices for its customers.

And the Obama administration knows that this is the case. They have admitted that their plans to implement this cap-and-trade system will increase energy costs. Don't worry, Obama will make sure that the appropriate households aren't affected by these increasing costs. The plan is to use the revenue generated by the carbon trade system in order to "soften the impact of higher energy prices." But anyone worth more than the wheels on their house will not see any of these promised benefits. That's because the Obama administration says, "There will be those who are going to be vulnerable as we make this transition and ... we need to actually target the allowance value and revenues to those households, communities, and businesses."

Those who are "vulnerable" is just another way of saying .. those people who are poor and vote Democrat. Those people who can't afford to shoulder the burden of this society but are more than willing to reap the benefits of its massive government welfare system. Those are the people that the Barack Obama administration wants to aid in this transition. And are you really buying the fact that these government welfare checks to offset higher energy costs will only be temporary? No way. That's the beauty of government - once you get the people hooked on an entitlement program, you can never ever take it away and politicians will always have it as political leverage.

Yesterday Barack Obama decided that he wanted to throw more money at another problem. So he unveiled his plan to spend $2.4 billion for electric vehicle development. The plan also gives a $7,500 tax credit to people who buy plug-in hybrid vehicles.

So what's the problem? The problem is that there isn't a market for these vehicles. As of right now, hybrid cars only represent 2% of US vehicle sales, and it is deeply unprofitable for car companies. Just wait until the people buying those hybrids (and I have one myself) have to replace the batteries. You're going to hear howls of outrage then. My guess? The government will come in with some taxpayer-funded program to help people replace batteries in their hybrids. What fun.

In short .. Obama wants to give them money anyway to make cars that people don't want to buy. According to the LA Times:

Last month, only 15,144 hybrids sold nationwide, down almost two-thirds from April, when the segment's sales peaked and gas averaged $3.57 a gallon. That's far larger than the drop in industry sales for the period and scarcely a better showing than January, when hybrid sales were at their lowest since early 2005.

Yet automakers believe they have little choice but to make more hybrids. Though car buyers are losing interest, politicians are pushing them as key to reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil and limiting the global-warming gases that cars emit into the atmosphere.

Did you know that the auto parts industry is also getting a bailout? Just another $5 billion of your tax dollars. No matter what happens to the recipient car company, the money will be paid. The payment of new bailout money to auto parts manufacturers is your sure sign that more bailout money is on its way to GM and others. BOHICA

Unless you haven't really been paying attention, you must realize by now that Obama's plans to increase taxes on every American by increasing the cost of energy in this country. We've been through this routine before. But now we have a new line from the Obama administration ...

According to tax cheat Timothy Geithner, oil and natural gas companies do not deserve tax breaks from the federal government because their businesses contribute to global warming. That's right .. our Treasury Tax Cheat believes in man-made global warming.

Unbelievable.

Geithner said to Congress, "We don't believe it makes sense to significantly subsidize the production and use of sources of energy (like oil and gas) that are dramatically going to add to our climate change (problem). We don't think that's good economic policy and we think changing those incentives is good for the country."

Now what you are seeing here is exactly what I've been telling you to expect for years. The Democrats want their hands on every single possible penny the private sector produces. To do this they will promote this tired and discredited global warming dog squeeze as a reason to drain more money from energy companies.

As for Geithner .. he's a tax cheat. No ... that isn't strong enough. He's a damned tax cheat. He plotted to cheat on his taxes, then carried that plot through; and he was caught. Now he's our Treasury Secretary.

A tax cheat in charge of the IRS. Change you can believe in.

And on top of all of that nonsense about a tax system based on "fairness" .. we have an administration that is knowingly going to increase the price of energy in this country, and tax the businesses and the wealthy in order to make sure that it is "affordable" for everyone. In other words .. energy is going to become a "right."

Here's the routine. Obama brings us massive new taxes on virtually all forms of energy. You will then have to pay more for heating your homes, keeping your lights on, paying for gas. Then the Obama financial wizards will come up with a whole new welfare system to pay people, out of taxpayer funds, who cannot afford the new energy prices ... the poor, poor, pitiful poor and middle class. These new welfare checks will, as is Obama's habit, be called "tax cuts" or "tax breaks." And who will be the people who will get these wonderful new tax cuts under Obama? That would be the people who pay little to no taxes to begin with. These tax breaks aren't tax breaks .. they are welfare checks in order to subsidize the increased cost of energy for the Democrat voting base - the poor.

The Democrat "strategists" will go on CNN and Fox News and tell everyone how Obama is giving tax breaks to the majority of Americans .. and we'll buy it hook, line and sinker.

Barack Obama .. he's a do whatever you have to do to win kinda guy. Don't you just love that about him? So ... how does Obama plan to ram through his healthcare and energy schemes? After all, he doesn't have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Surely there's something he can do. As a matter of fact, there is! He will use a procedural tactic that would only require 50 votes in order to pass the Senate. Here's the deal. You include your health "reforms" in a budget reconciliation bill. These bills require only 50 votes to pass and no filibuster is permitted. Peter Orszag is the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Now he says that he would prefer that this budget reconciliation process not be used, but, after all, health care is crucial ... and when you dealing with something so very important like this you may just have to use some awkward tactics. After all ... as Orszag says, healthcare is "the key to our fiscal future." More like the key to increased government dependency.

Health care isn't the only thing Obama will get through using this tactic. Obama has a grand new taxation plan out there called "carbon cap and trade." Look for this to become law by the same means.

Do you doubt that our wonderful, amazing, greatest president in the history of this country would try some devious tactics to enact his socialist agenda? Permit me to remind you how he won his very first election to public office. He didn't win at the ballot box ... he won by sending his cohorts to the courthouses to work on disqualifying all of his opponents. If you can't beat them, have them removed from the ballot. Whatever works is good enough for Obama ... including nationalizing our healthcare through budgetary trickery.

Maybe this rhetoric from Orszag has something to do with it. He says, "I just reject the theory that the only thing that drives economic performance is the marginal tax rate on wealthy Americans and the only way of being pro-market is to funnel billions and billions of dollars of subsidies to corporations."

Simply put ... what a jerk. Orszag seems to be every bit the anti-capitalist his boss is. Stand by for health care rationing my friends. For those of you who don't believe it could ever happen ... I would really like to be there when some half-assed government bureaucrat tells you that you just don't qualify for some medical procedure because there are others younger and more worthy than you who have longer to live and more to accomplish.

Did you know that Obama's budget includes new taxes and fees on the oil and natural gas industry? Because right now seems like a really great time to place more of a burden on our domestic markets. Meanwhile, Obama is going to increase funding for the Interior Department by $50 million in order to "assess alternative energy resources and bolster clean energy development." The truth is that this money will be spent to fight the expansion of any energy projects that don't pass the "alternative" test.

Basically, PrezBO's budget levies an excise tax on oil and natural gas from the Gulf of Mexico, which take $5.3 billion from oil and natural gas companies and put it into the hands of the imperial federal government. This 13% tax will apparently only be levied on companies currently not paying royalties due to a loophole. It also places $4 per acre annual fee on energy leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Other tax breaks include the manufacturing tax credit, enhanced oil recovery tax credit and marginal well tax credit.

What Obama is doing is using the power of government to squeeze the life out of the domestic oil and gas industry. And since it is unpopular to get oil from countries like Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, we will have no choice but to turn to green energy. He wants the transformation of America to alternate energy to be his legacy. It could turn into our economic epitaph.

Barack Obama says that he is going to stimulate the economy and create 4 million jobs by investing in green energy. He plans to invest billions of dollars to upgrade the national energy grid to that we can get our power from alternative energy sources like wind, water and the sun. In fact, Obama wants to double alternative energy production in just three years.

But guess what needs to happen first ..... the solar and wind energy industries need a bailout. Yep, in order for Obama to stimulate the economy, he must first spend billions in order to prop up the industries he intends to use. Executives from the wind and solar industries say that they need help in the upcoming stimulus package in order to meet Obama's goals. They claim the economic downturn has made the effectiveness of a tax credit for their investors virtually obsolete. Instead, executives want to change the tax credit to a tax refund. The cost to make that switch? Over $1 billion over the next two years.

And when it comes to your own home .. the government wants to make sure that you can use all this "green energy" that it has created, and that you are changing your energy consumption habits. So, Representatives Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) have proposed to Obama the creation of a national "green bank." This bank would be a fund that would help homeowners fix up their houses to make them energy efficient. Just what we need - another government program. Its official name is the National Clean Energy Lending Authority. It would be a $10 billion program responsible for financing the transformation of the energy sector.

Now we have a nice nasty little internal Democrat tinkling contest in the Congress. Rep. John Dingell of Michigan is currently the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. But that may no longer be the case. The Democrats want a more aggressive global warming agenda. They want to save the planet ... and John Dingell may put up too much of a fight. When I say "fight" I mean that he won't necessarily be Barack Obama's grocery bagger when it comes to global warming policy.

So who do the Democrats want as their guy? Henry Waxman of Beverley Hills. He's generally an anti-business kinda guy. He's the head of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform; Waxman is the guy in change of government investigations on everything from oil company profits to steroid use in baseball.

Where the battle gets interesting is the fact that Dingell is from Michigan and has made it difficult for the government to impose stricter fuel standards on automakers. Meanwhile, Waxman is a fan of tough environmental regulations and an overhaul of the auto industry. Does this auto-union bailout have anything to do with this vote?

Either way, a committee secret ballot of 25-22 recommended that Waxman be the new chair of the energy committee. The entire House still has to vote on whether or not they want to accept that recommendation ... but I think the message is clear. Barack Obama has made promises on key issues: healthcare reform and climate change. We'll get to healthcare in a minute, but having Waxman as the chair of this committee would be one less minor bump to deal with ... it would be a sign from Congress that they are eager to work with Obama in passing climate change legislation.